Accordion music has become part of Macclesfield District General Hospital’s daily rhythm
For 35 years, John Jones has turned the corridors of Macclesfield District General Hospital into an unexpected performance space. The 84-year-old retired engineer has spent decades playing the accordion for patients, visitors and staff while raising money for East Cheshire NHS Charity. What began as a personal attachment to an instrument his father loved has grown into one of the hospital’s longest-running volunteer efforts.
Jones first learned the accordion after watching his father play. When his father died, he began experimenting with the instrument himself, teaching himself the buttons and keys by ear and by persistence. The instrument’s structure — piano-like on one side, button-driven on the other — gave him a skill he could develop independently, and that self-taught approach later became the foundation for a lifetime of volunteering. He has also performed in care homes, extending the same quiet, low-tech form of companionship beyond the hospital walls.
The setting matters. Hospital spaces are filled with waiting, uncertainty and long, unstructured periods that can feel heavier than the actual clinical tasks happening inside them. Live music does not replace treatment, but it can soften the experience of waiting for a scan, a diagnosis or news from intensive care. In places where anxiety often arrives before the clinician does, an accordion in the corridor can change the emotional temperature of the building without saying a word.
A volunteer appeal for a CT scanner became a years-long commitment
Jones’s hospital volunteering began in 1991, after he visited Macclesfield District General Hospital with his mother-in-law and saw an appeal for a CT scanner. He started collecting donations and never stopped. Over time, he raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the charity, converting regular performances into sustained support for local services and equipment.
One memory has stayed with him for years. After helping raise money for the scanner, he later needed a CT scan himself. A nurse joked that he was using the scanner he had helped pay for. The exchange clearly meant a great deal to him, because it closed a circle between donation and direct care. For volunteers who support hospital fundraising, that kind of personal connection can be powerful: the money collected in small, repeated acts eventually returns as a machine, a service or a safer patient pathway.
Jones holds an MBE for services to charity, recognition that reflects the scale and durability of his work. Yet the story remains grounded in the ordinary: a man with an accordion, a hospital corridor and a habit of showing up. There is no grand organizational machinery behind it. The impact has come from repetition, trust and the kind of presence that grows more valuable over time.
ICU fundraising took on deeper meaning after June Jones died from sepsis
His charitable focus later shifted in a more personal direction. The money he raised was used to fund a family room at the hospital’s intensive care unit, a space that became even more important after his wife, June, died from sepsis in 2020. She had also been in intensive care five years earlier with the same condition and survived that earlier episode.
Sepsis changes the meaning of an ICU in a family’s life. It is not only a place where critical care is delivered; it becomes the setting where relatives wait, hope and sometimes grieve. A family room beside intensive care is not an architectural extra. It gives relatives somewhere to sit, collect themselves and stay close to the person receiving treatment, which can matter profoundly during unstable and emotionally draining admissions. Jones’s decision to direct fundraising toward intensive care was personal, tied to both his wife’s illness and the fact that his youngest daughter is a matron in intensive care in Australia.
He also knows many of the staff personally, having visited and supported the hospital for so long. That continuity is rare in modern healthcare, where patients and families often move quickly through systems with little chance to build long-term familiarity. Here, the relationship has lasted across decades, across births, illnesses and bereavements. The hospital became both the venue for his music and the site of his family’s most difficult medical experiences.
Jones has said that raising money for intensive care feels especially close to his heart. His words capture a basic truth about charity in healthcare: the most meaningful giving often grows out of direct contact with care, not abstract philanthropy. A ward, a scanner or a family room can become deeply personal when someone has watched a relative depend on it.
Volunteer work, hospital memory and the power of staying visible
Zara Jones, chief executive at East Cheshire NHS Trust, described it as a privilege to have so many people willing to donate their time. She said many volunteers have their own stories about care they or their families have received at the hospital, and those personal links make their support especially meaningful.
That observation fits Jones’s story exactly. His volunteering is not an occasional gesture attached to a single campaign. It is a 35-year pattern of visibility, return visits and practical help. He plays the accordion, collects funds and keeps showing up at a place where many people arrive under stress and leave with a memory of how they were treated. For patients, families and staff, the music may be brief, but the continuity is the real story.
There is also a broader lesson in the way this story sits inside a hospital. Healthcare institutions are usually discussed through equipment, staffing pressures and clinical outcomes. Yet the human environment around care influences how those systems are experienced. A volunteer musician does not change the diagnosis, but he can change the day. In a hospital that has seen his support for 35 years, the sound of an accordion has become part of the building’s social memory, tied to fundraising, bereavement, recovery and gratitude.